


sunshine, daisies, butter mellow

by consumptive_sphinx



Category: Amenta - Alicorn
Genre: Caste Related Shenanigans, For Want of a Nail, Gen, you all wanted me to make elsie happy so here's a fic where she's happy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-21
Updated: 2018-05-21
Packaged: 2019-05-09 14:19:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 469
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14717720
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/consumptive_sphinx/pseuds/consumptive_sphinx
Summary: Elsie starts dying her hair when she's one and a half, or, more accurately, her father starts dying her hair for her. It's a lovely buttery sunshine yellow, a little bit warmer and a little bit darker than her father's hair. Elsie looks beautiful with it.(Elsfar is an orange name. This time around, Elsie is short for Elsime, much more popular and classically yellow.)





	sunshine, daisies, butter mellow

Elsie starts dying her hair when she's one and a half, or, more accurately, her father starts dying her hair for her. It's a lovely buttery sunshine yellow, a little bit warmer and a little bit darker than her father's hair. Elsie looks beautiful with it. 

(Elsfar is an orange name. This time around, Elsie is short for Elsime, much more popular and classically yellow.) 

She never gets a younger brother; yellow credits are more expensive than orange credits. Her father calls her his clever girl, the cleverest daughter he'll ever have, and Elsie laughs and hugs him and learns contract law at his knee and her mother never steps in to tell her that she's learning the wrong parts of herself. In oneschool Elsie writes up contracts in purple crayon for her friends to sign when they're fighting, and her teachers call her bright, promising. 

When she's two she goes into law track, same as her father. Intellectual property law is fascinating, and Elsie never needs to be prompted to study - it's a struggle to get her to _stop._

When she's three she makes an online friend over a sci fi series they both like. When she's five he does not talk her down from the rooftop; she is never on the rooftop. Elsie throws everything she has into her job, not out of a sense of obligation but because she loves it. When she's five and a half he turns out to be red. She blocks him without another word.

The years go by. When Elsie is seven she meets a boy with hair the color of the sun and a girl with hair the color of a high-visibility reflective vest, a secretary and an auditor respectively. They have a high enough combined income that they can easily afford verified food that spring when the Voan crisis hits. Nobody who Elsie loves is dead; she does not have to grieve in private. She doesn't donate unverified food; why would she? 

The fall that Elsie is eight the three of them get married. That spring Elsie's pregnant and it's the most beautiful feeling in the whole world. She has a daughter, a beautiful little yellow girl named Natan, and she loves her more than life, more than light.

Orvara drives out all of its reds. Elsie skims over the newspaper that morning, kisses her wife and husband and daughter, and goes into work. Red cleaning is invented in Anitam and by all accounts it works, it's so obviously a more sustainable solution that they all hope Asfat adopts it. 

Then the massacres in Evalee, then Biyan. Elsie gives money to charities for Evaleen purples and Biyani cleaning centers, holds her husband and her daughter and is held by her wife. 

She does not smuggle out a single blanket.


End file.
